Review The Mentalists

The Mentalists

By Richard Bean

Utopia Or Bust

http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/Tickets/TheMentalists/TheMentalists.asp

Imagine, if you will, a Finsbury Park bed and breakfast hotel room. It’s a bit grungy, a nylon bedspread on the double bed, a trouser press on one side, a chair looking like it comes from a hospital ward on the other. A TV mounted on the wall, an ensuite bathroom behind a curtain. A phone on the wall, a plate of meat sandwiches covered with cling film and bowl of fruit.

Rather different from the luxury hotel of the Greek finance minister, The Mentalists’ hotel room has no headed notepaper as far as we could tell. Nevertheless a joke about the Greeks seems now to have an added resonance in this 2002 play.

Enter two men. Ted (Stephen Merchant in a respectable stage debut) or “China” to his friend. He’s a boy-scoutish beanpole, skinny legs poking out of long shorts and short sleeved shirt, fleet manager in a cleaning products firm.  So far, so ordinary with a raft of credit cards even if they do bounce ... But then there’s his scheme, based on the “radical behaviourism” theory of a (real) dodgy social scientist to correct the world with a Utopian community. That’s if Ted can get at least a thousand people at £29.99 each (!!!).

Morrie (Steffan Rhodri hitting exactly the right reassuring tone) is the camp yet butch Walthamstow hairdresser who has agreed to film a promotional video for his friend. Seemingly more stable, he nevertheless has a side line in porn films and tall tales. Like a fluctuating stock exchange, his imaginary father in one fantasy “was the only British boxer to have boxed at every weight. He could put it on, lose it, and then put it on again. Chips.”  But also with material concerns: “Can we sort the money out first China?”

A mini-diversion: have you returned to this blog, lured again by a Twitter or Facebook link  and expecting a review in our modestly ;) inimitable style? Then, in a non-hairdressing way, you have been conditioned.

However if you are a stranger who decided to take Google for a walk and the belief ran through your mind spontaneously the premise of our review is attractive, you are an example of mentalism.  At least, simply speaking and if we understand correctly, that’s the difference between the behaviourist and the mentalist schools of psychology.

Industrial psychologist turned stand up turned playwright Richard Bean wrote this two hander,  as part homage to Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter,  for a National Theatre festival and there are plenty of gags to keep the laughter coming in this two act one hour and 50 minute piece. At the same time, it feels more gag led than character or plot-based and the production a little over-blown for an intimate fringe-type play. We even wondered at one point if it would have worked better set in California on the fringes of Hollywood.

Nevertheless, amazingly, Bean in this 2002 play, methodically directed by Abbey Wright, seems to have had a magic globe, with Ted mentioning a test drive in Iceland (predicting the 2008 financial crash?) and Morrie Cyprus (2012 financial crash?), followed by the uncanny cracks about the Greeks.

The plot when it does kick in feels rather contrived and goes for far fetched cliché, despite Ted’s plan having (an unmentioned) parallel in real life, the government “nudge nudge” agency

Even so, one could say every audience could conform to behaviourism (“Hey, it’s Stephen Merchant, it’s a Richard Bean play, I will laugh, it will be funny!”) or mentalism (“What the hell, know nothing about this, but at these prices it had better be good!”), so maybe in the end it’s two actors in a play riffing on theories. And then of course we the audience are being experimented on like lab rats or Pavlov’s dog. ;) A TLT mentalist or behaviourist (depending on your school of thought) amber light.

 

Review Little Malcolm And His Struggle Against The Eunuchs

Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against The Eunuchs
by David Halliwell 

Malcolm's Kampf 
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

What a treat! Traffic lights in a play! Far be it that Traffic Light Theatregoer and her little limo ever identify with or are influenced by thespian japes! Yet there was a frisson of pleasure as four 1960s’ Huddersfield art student revolutionaries overran the lights in the dark comedy “Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against The Eunuchs” by the late David Halliwell,  directed by Clive Judd in a three hour version.

Veteran director Mike Leigh, aged 22, took on Little Malcolm (formerly named "One Long Wank" but this was still the age of the Lord Chamberlain as censor) fresh from RADA in 1965. The original script would have run about 17 hours, although he managed to cut it down to a mere –er – six at its first performance.   

Needless to say it flopped, but since then completed a pared-down West End and Broadway run with John Hurt, became an acclaimed movie produced by George Harrison  (shelved for many years, after the Beatles' split, with solvent assets falling into the hands of The Official Receiver’s office) and has had various successful theatre runs.

Expelled from art school by his arch nemesis, the unseen principal Mr Allard, Malcolm Scrawdyke (Daniel Easton in a performance growing in stature as the play progressed), running out of coins for his meter,  determines to grab “absolute power” with his Dynamic Erection party from those he deems his enemies characterised as “eunuchs"

  

From his local stronghold with his cronies, manipulative Irwin Ingham (Barney McElholm), artist Wick Blagdon (Laurie Jamieson), would be novelist and eventual rival Dennis Charles Nipple (Scott Arthur), he plots to kidnap and blackmail Allard plus steal a Stanley Spencer painting.

The play is structured around a series of monologues with the group’s winter adventures interspersed. All the while party policies become suffused with their own insecurities and fear of women.Wrapped in party flags and banners, their actions driven by treacherous words eventually take a turn for the sinister reaching a pinnacle with a show trial (Scott Arthur at his resonant best as the defendant) with fabricated 'facts' and violence. 

The audience sits on two sides of a performance area, Scrawdyke’s bedsit cum studio. An evocative blackboard Lowry-type industrial town in white chalk serves as backdrop with a cleverly concealed door from designer Jemima Robinson.  The discerningly used jazz snippets (there are a record player and LPs on the set) and drum sound effects (shades of  recent demagogue movie Whiplash?) by Giles Thomas also deserve an accolade with lighting from Elanor Higgins.   

The first half was marred by some impenetrable accents, apart from McElholm’s distinctive Irwin, though the laughs still came thick and fast. Nevertheless the accents miraculously gained in clarity in the second act.

And it is very funny. Watching, we were reminded of the best of Tony Hancock, maybe Till Death Do Us Part, and, very much in the second act, of Harold Pinter. 

Yet this baggy monster of a play about a monster and his acolytes stands on its own two feet,  assimilating Napoleon, Hitler and gas chambers, Doestoevsky, Nietzche,  Shaw, Lord of The Flies, Joyce, Chaplin, Look Back In Anger, Cole Porter, Kafka, Orwell and probably more. At the same time perhaps looking forward in more innocuous form, John Sullivan’s sitcom Citizen Smith and Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Lisa Mayer’s The Young Ones. 

Of course the play’s iconography may be very much rooted in an analysis of the conditions leading to the rise of Hitler with the Ministries of Justice, Propaganda and the courts in key roles.  While with  the Trotskyite and Stalinist factions of the 1950s and 1960s’ in the Soviet Union and beyond,  grants could equally mean  “Soviet gold” (or copeks for the meter!) for foreign agents as much as British local education authority funding for students (sadly topical).

The same ambivalence emerges in the Pinteresque second act, with the bedsit named as 3a Commercial Chambers – a Tony Hancock-type address if ever there was one. Yet the legalistic manoeuvrings also reminiscent of some perverted barristers’ chambers metamorphose into a state-of-the-nation comment on post imperial Cold War Britain starved of resources as much as the National Socialist corporate state and Soviet Union. 

A late violent episode against the only woman in the piece Ann Gedge (a nuanced performance by Rochenda Sandall) reminded us of Pinter’s Lenny punching an old lady, left by her brother “in law”, in The Homecoming when Lenny clears snow for the borough council.  

All in all, the second act of Little Malcolm felt far more of an organic whole than the first. It’s a bit touch and go before that. Still, at the end of three hours, it all felt needed. The charismatic characters with the integral intricate twists and turns of thought keep the play fresh for its 50^th anniversary - and there's traffic lights too! :) So an amber/green light from TLT!

Review Orson's Shadow

Orson’s Shadow 

by Austin Pendleton

From an idea of Judith Auberjonois 

Suitable Lives For Treatment 

www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk 

After a disastrous theatre run of his Shakespeare adaptation Chimes At Midnight, Orson Welles rolls into London in 1960 to direct Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright at The Royal Court.  Olivier himself is in the midst of a marriage break up with troubled film star wife Vivien Leigh and about to leave her for his young co-star. 

Welles, while hating the play, absurdist French drama Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, is lured by the chance to work with Olivier and raise his profile to find finance for his movie pitches from either the Eastern bloc or the Middle East. Instead the collaboration is mired in acrimony and pettiness with Olivier going behind the exasperated Welles's back, giving directorial notes to the cast.

Austin Pendleton, who acted with Welles in Catch 22 (see 2m 31s), fleshed out this little-known episode with some artistic liberties in 2000 and turned it into a well-received backstage play Orson’s Shadow. Now it receives its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse directed by Alice Hamilton.

Set at a time when television was starting to take hold and just before the onset of new stars growing up with film rather than theatre or radio, this Cold War piece captures the moment of ageing stars caught adrift.

A middle aged Welles (John Hodgkinson) with Falstaffian girth, unresponsive to diet pills as he gulps down multiple steaks, tries to discard his reputation as a one-hit wonder with Citizen Kane. Olivier (Adrian Lukis)  flushed with his success in Angry Young Man John Osborne’s Suez play The Entertainer, albeit harking back to a past age of music hall,  is about to found the National Theatre with enfant terrible Marxist theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (Edward Bennet). 

Indeed the travails of Welles and Olivier seem to be presented mostly through the filter of Tynan as narrator, with a soupçon of unreliability, portrayed as a fixer. 

Both rhinoceroses in their own way, the lumberingly obese yet sure-footed Welles and the scheming yet insecure Olivier cross swords. Pendleton also inserts into the mix Olivier’s lover, Joan Plowright (Louise Ford), a straightforward personality of the new acting generation standing her ground between the rivals.

Meanwhile exotic Vivien Leigh (Gina Bellman) floats in like some spirit conjured up by both Tynan’s malevolent yet grudgingly admiring imagination and Olivier’s Svengali impulses. Add to this, a fictional Irish stagehand Sean (Ciaran O’Brien).

Infused with wry humour and a mash up of acting styles from melodrama to naturalism with a gallop through playwriting history,  this ambitious production can be interesting but is also uneven. Despite Tynan’s naturalistic ironic commentary played against the deliberate staginess of the first act, there is a sense of self conscious exposition and name dropping.

The interlacing of acting styles, character and back story finds more purpose in the second act, when Tynan, despite himself,  is sucked into the action and the reason for the play’s title brought into focus. An amber light from TLT and automotive companion.

Review Measure For Measure

Measure For Measure

By William Shakespeare 

Whose Law Is It Anyway?

 www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It was hot, hot, hot at The Globe and that wasn’t just the sex and corruption on view in Shakespeare’s 1604 (or thereabouts) ‘problem’ play Measure For Measure. For the groundlings’ fans were fluttering as we sweltered in a catch-it-while-it-lasts fully-fledged British heatwave!

For those who don’t know the latest 1604 salacious gossip, the puritan Lord Angelo (Kurt Egyiawan), deputizing for the Duke of Vienna (Dominic Rowan) and a martinet when it comes to enforcing the law of no sex without marriage, has been caught trying to having his wicked way with novice nun Isabella (Mariah Gale). 

A bit rich, since Isabella only came to him to plead for her brother Claudio’s (Joel MacCormack) life after the latter admitted getting one Juliet (no, not that Juliet, another one in the shape of Naana Agyei-Ampadu) up the duff and now faces execution. 

And the state, after turning a blind eye for many a year, has suddenly found itself shocked, shocked to find debauchery and brothels on nearly every street corner.

 

Will Angelo get away with it? Will Isabella save her brother? And how will she save her brother? And will Duke Vincentio save Vienna, even if it thinks it doesn’t need saving?

Well, it is termed a comedy rather than a tragedy, so perhaps you can guess at least some of the answers. And Artistic Director’s Dominic Dromgoole’s swansong production at The Globe certainly seeks to milk every ounce of comedy with the bawdiest of bawds (Petra Massey), a light-footed roly poly Constable (crowd-pleasing Dean Nolan) a wobbly man toy who seems to be able to right himself after numerous tumbles, a Duke who seems to have leapt off the alternative comedy circuit and even a play on the name of Claudio reminiscent of the Mel Brooks’ Frankenstein pronounciation quip  

But Measure For Measure is also a late, dark play alongside Troilus and Cressida, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest with echos of The Merchant of Venice and, while harking back to the mores of another age, strangely modern in its take on economic, sex and marriage issues. 

Claudio has broken the law with Juliet because she cannot marry while her merchant relatives keep back her dowry to use in their business. There’s the fear of single motherhood. The Duke, who doesn’t want to be the baddie, allowing brothels for many years and then stamping down on them, delegates responsibility to others. 

Angelo of course would now be ripe titillating hypocrite fodder for many a tabloid. For the broadsheets also, having rejected on spurious grounds fiancée Marianne (Rosie Hilal) after she loses her dowry and the implications of the “private order” to expedite Claudio’s execution.  

Even the crude pun on marriage by the-pimp-turned-assistant-executioner Pompey (Trevor Fox) almost (but not quite) makes equals of husbands and wives: “If the man be a bachelor, sir, I can; but if he a married man, he’s his wife’s head and I can never cut off a woman’s head.” 

The Duke’s words give Juliet’s lover a status in modern lingo: “Your partner, as I hear, must die tomorrow.” And his final words to Isabella have a modern ring: “What’s mine is yours and what is yours is mine”, taking their relationship with each other outside the realms of family and dowry. 

So how well does this production marry the dark and lighter shades? The bawds are rightly called bawds and fill the large Globe stage, but it does sometimes feel like comic overload undermining the darker aspects of a play examining weighty issues. 

However, Mariah Gale makes an intriguing Isabelle – initially an over schooled student, shying away from life, with rehearsed speeches before finding her own voice and clear-sighted disgust as first her brother’s and then her own situation becomes more and more desperate. In the final scene, as she retreats to a chair and tries to make sense of the situation,  we believe in her baptism of fire into worldliness, the uncertainty of events and people.

Kurt Egyiawan’s Angelo is more inscrutable and it does feel sometimes that his interpretation is the play straining at the bit for a modern dress version.  

Indeed, the New Orleans tinge to the music made a pleasing and somehow plausible mash-up in this production.

It’s with the Duke that the problems of this problem play are highlighted. In this ultimate ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodies’ play, he seems a  figure hoofing it. This brings out a lot of humour in his tonsured disguise as a religious friar but this personality seems at odds to the supposed restoration of order at the end of the play, despite his humble profession on his knees asking Isabella for her hand in marriage. 

So the different measures of this production were not always equal for us, but we award it a golden sunshiny amber light.

 

Review The Seagull

The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

The Rivals

https://openairtheatre.com/production/the-seagull

The Seagull! Squawk! In a new version by writer Torben Betts directed by Matthew Dunster! Squawk! At Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre! OK, enough of these seagull noises!

Of course, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre made its name with the once annual play-within-a-comedy by the English bard, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”. Here we have a Russian classic, Anton Chekhov’s human comedy and viewed as the first of his theatrical masterpieces. 

And it seems like a dream location, outdoors: water (a man-made stage lake), trees, sky.

The Regent's Park stage is reflected by a huge angled mirror suspended from the heavens for a play with a bitter yet loving satiric edge, It’s a clever touch by designer Jon Bausor in this most self-reflexive of plays about life, theatre and art, where all the characters also reflect each other in one way or another. And all just as relevant in our virtual age!  As the characters stroll on stage, the mirror, hanging like Nature's camera, gives a bird’s eye reverse view, yet frames the figures like the French and Russian paintings of the time.

TLT and her horseless scarlet troika have only ever read The Seagull and were keen to experience this early Chekhov classic tableaux 1895 play of unrequited love, disappointment, life, theatre  – oh, yes and comedy :).

 

Writer Torben Betts who adapted this version made quite a splash with crowd-pleasing Invincible. But Chekhov is pretty funny too in his poignant and, in TLT’s view, subtly political sort of way. If fans of Invincible come to this, they may be surprised to learn that most of the best jokes come from Chekhov. 

Irina Arkadina (a finely drawn and gracefully humorous performance by Janie Dee) returns with her lover Boris Trigorin (Alex Robertson), a successful novelist, to the family estate, home of her bachelor brother retired state councillor and lawyer, Peter Sorin (a suitably curmodgeonly Ian Redford). 

Also living on the estate are Irina’s fretful student drop-out and would-be avant-garde playwright son Constantin (Matthew Tennyson) alongside the farm manager Ilia (Fraser James), his wife Paulina (Lisa Palfrey), their disenchanted goth-like daughter Masha (Lisa Diveney). Wandering in are idealistic young Nina (Poldark’s Sabrina Bartlett), living on a neighbouring estate with her landowner father and stepmother, the old lothario of a doctor, Eugene Dorn (a relaxed and engaging performance from Danny Webb) and impecunious schoolmaster Simon Medviedenko (Colin Hoult). 

Like a seagull, the play is a delicate but tough old bird winging its way through stage conventions, symbolism, images, impressions, politics, history, the constant merging yet separation of  life and theatre.  Still, a play is a play and birds don’t normally get reviews ... ;)

While much critical writing dwells on Constantin as artist, his passion for Nina, and the mother-son relationship, perhaps the play is just as much about the rivalry between two actresses.

  

The women are the centre of attention (much to Constantin’s chagrin) but their positions are always fragile.  For example, in spite of her selfishness and self absorbtion, why should we doubt Irina’s assertion that her costumes use up much of her cash?  Nina, infatuated with Boris but also playing her hand against Irina, makes the decision to go to Moscow and take to the stage when she learns the actress and her lover are leaving.

Boris does leave Irina for Nina but finally abandons the young actress and his child to go back to Irina. In the end, Irina is seemingly successful,  Nina  made to drudge from one small town to another with the implication of possible prostitution to make ends meet. Yet both have lost the fathers of their children and, in a final (off stage) coup de théâtre, their children.

In fact, if it one wants to veer towards theatrical artificiality and a detective story, it’s almost as though other characters deliberately lure Nina to her fate of repertory company drudgery:  Irina herself, her brother the lawyer, the doctor all lavish Nina's acting with praise. Boris, indulged by Irina, seduces Nina, then returns to Irina and uses  the young actress’s life, made into tragedy, for his own purposes.    

Part of the unblinking toughness and poignancy of the play is the attraction and resistance to theatrical symbolism, the guying of melodrama, yet the conceding of the truth melodrama reveals. All back-to-back with hard-nosed money matters.

Seeing this production in final preview, TLT and her cabriolet were taken with the ingenious design, especially the play-within-a-play and the soundscape using recorded voice overs giving a satisfyingly visceral resonance. 

But the mash-up and experimenting with styles felt less successful. 

Nina’s pivotal final tussle against identification with the main symbol of the play, to retain her sanity, her dignity, to face reality and continue, did not come through for us. The production therefore lost its rhythm plus some of the play’s clear sightedness about human relations set within the context of a fast diminishing Russian Empire hierarchy. 

In our opinion, it felt sometimes too muddled to turn the audience into fellow travellers, enthused enough to sway at different times in favour of one character or another or to follow the story’s delicately incremental, viciously funny yet tragic development. 

Perhaps the open air location, particularly with some deliberately jarring sound effects, and large stage didn’t lend itself to the style of production. Nor is it surprising to read that director Matthew Dunster comes from the Young Vic and maybe it all would have worked better in that space. Still, an amber light for a stronger first act, ingenious design, some stand out performances and of course a spectacular park setting.

PS  What is it about seagulls? It did occur to TLT that a near contemporary of Chekhov, German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a famous cryptic poem about seagulls  Do these writer chaps know something about gulls that we don't?;)

Review Face The Music

Face The Music
Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin
Book by Moss Hart

http://www.yeolderoseandcrowntheatrepub.co.uk

Police Follies

It's showtime and TLT and her trusty four-wheeled steed took a detour from their usual West End and fringe venues to  venture into the exotic East. That is E17, namely Walthamstow  and Ye Olde Rose and Crown.

This pub theatre has built up a reputation, like the Union Theatre in South London, for resurrecting lesser known musicals. Indeed, this musical was truly “lost”, painstakingly excavated by the US musical archivists’ team from the Rogers and Hammerstein Organization. (There’s a bit of industry inside knowledge for you gleaned from the internet – the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization also represents the Irving Berlin copyrights!).

Certainly quite a few musical theatre afficianados, all of whom are on the venue’s mailing list,  sat alongside TLT at this first preview, eager to see a re-discovered piece directed by Brendan Matthew in its UK première, Face The Music 

.

No, not the other Irving Berlin show with the famous song "Let’s Face The Music And Dance”. Rather, an earlier revue-type musical written four years before  in 1932 with a topical book by Moss Hart  about – er – police graft in the Depression ... 

Yes, you read correctly Irving Berlin wrote a score which underneath all the gags and sunny satire is a pretty angry show about police  and mayoral graft, prostitution, money laundering, fixed court cases  – and, oh yes, putting on a show. 

From the outset, one has to say this was a very unbalanced (especially as regards sound levels) production but there was enough in it to make TLT wonder what it could be. 

At the same time, there was the frustration of a small orchestra often overpowering the voices in the cavernous hall serving as auditorium in this shoestring theatre, plus some strange staging choices affecting sightlines in the first act.

But the costumes (designer Joana Dias) are ingenious and the dance routines (choreographer: Sally Brooks)  satisfyingly witty with plenty of floor space for hoofers to hoof, cutting some particularly cute vaudeville silhouettes. 

The casting and styling too felt ingenious. Alessandro Lubrano as the juvenile lead Pat Mason, hair slicked to one side, actually looks like Irving Berlin in a chirpy performance with a clear singing voice including one of the better known songs “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee”. He’s matched by Joanna Hughes as Kit Baker as his love interest, maybe a little hampered by an underwritten role, but with equally sprightly vocals. 

And to continue the likenesses, Ceris Hines as vaudevillian Pickles Crouse, with a passing resemblance to Betty Boop/Julia McKenzie, gives an engagingly kooky and strong rendition of “I Don’t Wanna Be Married”, hoofing pleasingly with partner Lewis Dewar Foley as Mickey Rooney Joey Malarkey. While James Houlbrooke’s besotted police officer even managed to remind us of another James --  Jimmy Stewart. 

Whether or not these resemblances were intentional, it gave a satisfying resonance for this audience member.  

Joanne Clifton, of BBC’s ballroom hit Strictly Come Dancing fame, showed the expected grace in dance routines but also considerable singing chops and sincerity as actress-turned-street-walker in the satiric Torch Song and on the witness stand. 

“The producer came to me/That’s the night I lost my [pause]  modesty ...the business is dropping/The show is not liked by the mob ... And judge, I needed the job!” 

It’s that kinda raw show, it’s that kinda life as the show was first performed during a real investigation into New York City police  and magistrates’ courts corruption with its litany of bribery, perjury, framing of the innocent, fraud and  false imprisonment.  

 

Sure, the impressario Hal Reisman played by Samuel Naughton manages to put on a show, where in a piece of legalistic ventriloquism, the police, lousy with ill-gotten cash, launder their money and then have to raid the show for indecency after expected failure turns to success.   

Then in the second act he puts on a sop of a court case (“on every front page and they don’t even charge for admission”). So naturally there’s a happy ending for the manacled-together criminals, show people, court officials, judge, police chief (David Anthony) and wife (Laurel Dougall) – all rigged by the impressario of course.

Perhaps influenced by 1920s’ Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil without the overt socialist critique, it’s also as tough in its own way as Mel Brooks’s The Producers thirty years later which it obviously influenced. And maybe it stretches forward even to the 1975 John Kander and Fred Ebb Nowadays premise of Chicago . 

 

Anyway it was a raggedy sort of experience in Walthamstow with TLT and jalopy straining to follow the story and lyrics, but foiled much of the time by the sound levels and sometimes a little too much comedy mugging.   

One hopes now some of the flaws are ironed out as it enters mid-run. The audience, in an L-shape around the performing space, all seemed to relish, like TLT, the quality choreography and sporadic high points. So despite misgivings over sound levels, it’s an amber light for an intriguing piece. 

And  come to think about it, perhaps we’ve been misdirected about Irving Berlin by Fred Astaire’s pristine top hat and tails and Ginger Rogers’ high heels and feathers ...  “Before The Fiddlers Have Fled” could be construed as  pretty damned angry ...  

PS Having gone to see the first preview, TLT and her horsepower scarlet sidekick felt it only fair to forgo posting a next-day review but wait until further into the run.